Context: Model-Driven Development (MDD) is a paradigm that prescribes building conceptual models that abstractly represent the system and generating code from these models through transformation rules. The literature is rifely represent the system and generating code from these models through transformation rules. The literature is rife with claims about the benefits of MDD, but they are hardly...

Wide differences in labor productivity are observed between agriculture and industry in most developing countries. Research suggests that these differences – often denoted a “dual economy” effect – can explain a significant portion of low output per capita levels in these countries. A central input to the labor productivity calculation is the aggregate labor effort in the agricultural sector. U...

Coal is an important fossil fuel and will also be for the next decades [1]. The only way to achieve the challenges faced by the coal industry is to reduce production costs by improving productivity. Improvement of productivity has become an important goal for today’s coal industry in the race to increase price competitiveness. In recent years, underground mining method is becoming popular becau...

We develop a model of contracting in which individual effort choices are subject to social pressure to conform to the average effort level of others in the same risk‐sharing group. As in related models of social interactions, a change in exogenous variables or contract terms generates a social multiplier. In this environment, small differences in fundamentals such as skill or effort cost can le...

While many successful and well-known open source projects produce output of high quality, a general assessment of this development paradigm is still missing. In this paper, an online community of both small and large, successful and failed projects and their programmers is analysed mainly using the version-control data of each project, also according to their productivity and estimation of expe...

Microprocessor design complexity is growing rapidly. As a result, current development costs for top of the line processors are staggering, and are doubling every 4 years. As we design ever larger and more complex processors, it is becoming increasingly difficult to estimate how much time it will take to design and verify them. To compound this problem, processor design cost estimation still doe...

Many researchers and managers agree that small workgroups tend to lose productivity and speed as they grow large and that decision-making tends to become sluggish in very large organizations. These effects are attributed to collaborative coordination costs that grow in importance as functions of an organization’s scale. Understanding of these effects has however been primarily empirical and qua...

Embedded real-time applications are often built from scratch on a trial-and-error basis, which leads to sub-optimal designs with latent errors that are not detectable in early stages of use or deployment and often incurs prolonged time-to-market. A new application framework called Verifiable Embedded Real-Time Application Framework (VERTAF) is proposed for embedded real-time application develop...

Managing software development productivity and effort are key issues in software organizations. Identifying the most relevant factors influencing project performance is essential for implementing business strategies by selecting and adjusting proper improvement activities. There is, however, a large number of potential influencing factors. This paper proposes a novel approach for identifying th...

We extend the well-known fair wage-effort hypothesis to situations in which firms suffer from negative productivity shocks and test experimentally whether a fair employment hypothesis exists. The fair employment hypothesis stipulates that firms employ workers even if it is not profitable for them in the short run (after a negative productivity shock) in order to induce reciprocal behavior. Our ...